Saturday, April 08, 2006

Poem - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Populist Manifesto No. 1

Poets, come out of your closets,Open your windows, open your doors,You have been holed-up too longin your closed worlds.Come down, come downfrom your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,down from your foothills and mountains,out of your teepees and domes.The trees are still fallingand we’ll to the woods no more.No time now for sitting in themAs man burns down his own houseto roast his pigNo more chanting Hare Krishnawhile Rome burns.San Francisco’s burning,Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burningthe fossil-fuels of life.Night & the Horse approacheseating light, heat & power,and the clouds have trousers.No time now for the artist to hideabove, beyond, behind the scenes,indifferent, paring his fingernails,refining himself out of existence.No time now for our little literary games,no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,no time now for fear & loathing,time now only for light & love.We have seen the best minds of our generationdestroyed by boredom at poetry readings.Poetry isn’t a secret society,It isn’t a temple either.Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.The hour of oming is over,the time of keening come,a time for keening & rejoicingover the coming endof industrial civilizationwhich is bad for earth & Man.Time now to face outwardin the full lotus positionwith eyes wide open,Time now to open your mouthswith a new open speech,time now to communicate with all sentient beings,All you ‘Poets of the Cities’hung in museums including myself,All you poet’s poets writing poetryabout poetry,All you poetry workshop poetsin the boondock heart of America,All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets,All you pre-stressed Concrete poets,All you cunnilingual poets,All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,All you eyeless unrealists,All you self-occulting supersurrealists,All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,All you Groucho Marxist poetsand leisure-class Comradeswho lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat,All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,All you den mothers of poetry,All you zen brothers of poetry,All you suicide lovers of poetry,All you hairy professors of poesie,All you poetry reviewersdrinking the blood of the poet,All you Poetry Police -Where are Whitman’s wild children,where the great voices speaking outwith a sense of sweetness and sublimity,where the great’new vision,the great world-view,the high prophetic songof the immense earthand all that sings in itAnd our relations to it -Poets, descendto the street of the world once moreAnd open your minds & eyeswith the old visual delight,Clear your throat and speak up,Poetry is dead, long live poetrywith terrible eyes and buffalo strength.Don’t wait for the Revolutionor it’ll happen without you,Stop mumbling and speak outwith a new wide-open poetrywith a new commonsensual ‘public surface’with other subjective levelsor other subversive levels,a tuning fork in the inner earto strike below the surface.Of your own sweet Self still singyet utter ‘the word en-masse -Poetry the common carrierfor the transportation of the publicto higher placesthan other wheels can carry it.Poetry still falls from the skiesinto our streets still open.They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,the streets still alive with faces,lovely men & women still walking there,still lovely creatures everywhere,in the eyes of all the secret of allstill buried there,Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,Awake and walk in the open air.